Category: Awareness

As anyone who has read any of our articles or books knows already knows we place a high premium on developing and using situational awareness as an integral component of personal security. In fact if you were to do only one thing to make yourself safer – and nothing else – it would be to…

I recently read an article by Patrice Bonnafoux entitled What Too much Situational Awareness Does to Your Brain(http://www.urbanfitandfearless.com/2015/08/what-too-much-emphasis-on-situational.html) that raised some great points worth considering. While I don’t agree with everything in the article, it illustrates the danger of becoming hypervigilant when striving to be situationally aware. Hypervigilance is defined as is “an enhanced state…

If you are looking for a resource to improve your ability to be aware of your environment and identity threats before an attack occurs then look no further than Left of Bang by Patrick Van Horne and Jason Riley. While there are other books that discuss reading body language and detecting potential threats none really…

If you find the articles on Integrated Protective Concepts interesting and helpful you will enjoy the Staying Safe blog by Christopher Pendas. Christopher takes a proactive approach to personal protection and self defense that provides the reader useful tools and ideas that can be implemented immediately. His approach to developing and enhancing situational awareness goes…

In the past we have discussed the importance of pre-incident indicators with regard to detecting surveillance and other activities. It’s also important to recognize when an incident such as an assault, robbery or other violent crime may be about to unfold. Even crimes with a short or compressed operational cycle give off some pre-incident signs….

We have frequently emphasized the importance of situational awareness as the key component of personal security whether at home or overseas. We have discussed various levels of awareness and discussed when to raise our level of awareness such as during arrivals and departures, when entering known danger areas and so forth. It’s also important to…

While we are discussing unsolicited approaches it’s a good time to mention the criminal “interview” that is often the precursor to a robbery or assault. The interview occurs when the criminal engages the potential victim in conversation prior to initiating a crime. This usually serves two purposes: (1) it gives the criminal or criminals and…

In keeping with the themes of social engineering and elicitation its a good point to discuss the need to be wary of unsolicited approaches. We also need to be mindful that these approaches are not necessarily made in person although they can be. In today’s technological world they are frequently also made via email or…

In discussing social engineering and threats to your personal security we mentioned elicitation. Elicitation is a technique that is used by an adversary to get a person to unintentionally divulge more information about a particular subject than they normally would. Its used to gather confidential or proprietary information and in the realm of personal security…

Social engineering – the calculated manipulation and exploitation of people has historically been associated with cyber security issues. Computer hackers found they could best get access to secure networks by targeting the weakest link – the human factor. The same techniques used to get an employee to give up their password or provide other information…